What’s the prize for this contest? ”Winners will receive social notoriety.”

That sounds great, right?

Actually, it’s pretty shitty. The CW is taking advantage of its fans, most of whom are not professional artists, to get free artwork. They’re using the promise of exposure to lure you to make art for them instead of hiring and paying actual artists.

I know what some of you are thinking. “I’m a nobody in the art world. I need exposure. This is a great opportunity for me. Stop being such an elitist, Euclase. Everyone should have a chance to get their work seen.”

Yes. And after your work gets seen, do the jobs come rolling in? Maybe, if you’re lucky. But what will definitely happen is that The CW will keep doing this. And so will other companies who think it’s okay to take advantage of its fans. If the CW wants artists, they should hire artists or license artists, not make up a contest to get art for free.

You can enter this contest, and you might win exposure now, but you won’t get any jobs later on because there won’t be any. Because every art job out there will be a contest that pays in “social notoriety.”

Ugh, I hate these contests. The reality of it is that no, the jobs will not come rolling in. You could literally make the BEST poster in the whole batch, win the contest, and get all the ‘publicity’, but the jobs will not come rolling in.

Because the people who might have hired you will see that you work for free.

At best you may get a few offers of extremely low prices, because you have already shown you were willing to give your artwork up to a massive company that could have easily afforded standard Designer rates for free.

More realistically, no one will care who made that poster. Artists don’t really get famous these days, and the professional illustration world is going to care much more about your style and portfolio than it will if you won this or that free art poster contests. If I were still in Highschool I’d have seen this contest and been excited, I would have imagined winning it would have been a feather in my cap, so trust me I get it. But unfortunately these are basically at best scams that usually have the grace to give you a pittance of a reward for the thousands of dollars they’re going to make off your artwork; this one doesn’t even do that. It’s a scam, through and through.

doing so by throwing skinny girls under the bus, calling thinner girls “fake”, or insisting that being bigger is “what men really want” (implying that any female body type is only good if it has male approval):